Terry Godier and Dark Hours
2026-08-10 08:43:49.876594+02 by Dan Lyke 2 comments
Terry Godier — Mea Culpa - Dark Hours:
A developer who created another web app called DarkHours.app replied to my comment on Bluesky yesterday to show me how similar the project was to his, including the name. The thread is here.
Down to, of course, the use of Claude replicating a bug in the stolen project.
L. Rhodes linked to it, noting that:
We often frame the damage LLMs do to open source as side effects, but realistically, this is Claude operating precisely as intended… by the vendor. The aim is to convert the value created by other devs into profits for the AI company. It does so by automating the process of finding existing code, stripping it of authorship, matching it to the prompted task, and redeploying it for the company's customer. That, whether they realize it or not, is what the customer is paying the AI company to do.
And David Chisnall notes:
Just because the US copyright office has ruled that you, as the person promoting an LLM, cannot assert copyright on the output, does not mean that someone else can’t. If you take a DVD and transcode it to H.264, there is no creative step and so the new copy is not something subject to independent copyright, but it is a derived work of the DVD (itself a lower-quality derived work of the original masters) and so subject to the same copyright.
Edit: Colin Cornaby @colincornaby@mastodon.social looks at the Chisnal thread and notes:
I looked at the replies to this post, did some more digging, and found the actual story is *even weirder.*
BOTH projects were generated using Claude. So you have two people - both generating the same app from the same training data - having a public throw down over who copied who. Kind of embarrassing.
The one guy claiming his Claude generated code as an original creation no one else can "copy" is maybe the most embarrassing part.
And bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 @bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
The Dark Hours author who just published his Claude "Mea Culpa" has a history of being full of shit: https://daringfireball.net/202..._app_store_rejection_of_the_week